Beyond digitisation: a case study of three contemporary feminist collections

1. The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order was published by Temple University Press in 2013.

2. For the purposes of this discussion, ‘archives housed in physical repositories’ refer to archives comprised of collections of material documents housed in fixed locations. I use the terms ‘digital archives’ and ‘digital collections’ to refer to a wide range of collections of documents and other materials available online whether they are hosted on institutional or personal sites. However, the division between these types of collections is not as obvious as one might expect. So-called digital archives have their own materiality and are often closely linked to physical repositories; archives housed in physical repositories are increasingly being made available through various digital platforms (this is discussed at length in the final case study presented in this article). The nomenclature I have adopted, somewhat reluctantly, in this paper reflects what may be best understood as an ongoing ambivalence in the field about how best to theorise and categorise archives in a digital age.

3. See Jeff Sahadeo’s ‘Without the Past there is No Future’, in Antoinette Burton (ed.), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, Duke University Press, Durham, 2006.

4. QZAP or the Queer Zine Archive Project is a donation-based, volunteer-run project that aims to digitise queer zines and make them readily available to visitors in an easily accessible digital format. Indeed, visitors to the site are free to download any zine and to use it for whatever purpose they wish (reading, research and even reproduction). Many of the zines available on the QZAP site are available in institutional collections, including the Barnard College Zine Library and the zine collections at Duke University. All the librarians and archivists I interviewed during the course of my research considered the work of QZAP to be in keeping with the work they are carrying out in their own university-based collections. For more on QZAP, visit their website at <http://www.qzap.org/v7>, accessed 14 May 2013.

5. See QZAP’s mission statement, available at <http://www.qzap.org/v7/index.php/about-qzap/mission-statement>, accessed 14 May 2013.

6. Notably, all three contemporary feminist collections featured in my own study, The Archival Turn in Feminism, are housed in archives at private universities. More recently, after considerable debate, the Occupy Wall Street Archive, originally a haphazard collection of documents culled together by a collective at Zucotti Park, was donated to the NYU’s Tamiment Library & Robert F Wagner Labor Archives. It is worth noting that, while it took over a year for the Occupy materials to end up at the Tamiment Library, NYU archivists reached out to the collective when the occupation was still active. To be clear, these are just a few notable examples of activist-related collections ending up in private university archives. Moreover, while the practice of donating radical collections to archives at private institutions is controversial, in my own research I have discovered that, in many cases, activists support the move since the private institutions appear better equipped to both preserve and publicise these collections than public institutions and community-based collections.

7. Sarah Dyer, online interview, November 2011.

8. ibid.

9. ibid.

10. Kelly Wooten, interview, 26 January 2011.

11. ibid.

12. Lisa Darms, interview, 25 June 2010.

13. Jenna Freedman, ‘Collection Proposal: Women’s Studies Zines at Barnard College – Pilot Project’, June 2003, available at <http://zines.barnard.edu/proposal>, accessed 14 May 2013.

14. Jenna Freedman, interview, 17 April 2012.

15. ibid.

16. ibid.

17. Jenna Freedman, ‘AACR 2 – Bendable but Not Flexible: Cataloging Zines at Barnard College’, in KR Roberto (ed.), Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front, McFarland & Company, Jefferson, NC, 2008, p. 233.